January 26, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- I’d like to
share with you some questions–some flies that keep
buzzing in my head.

Is justice
right side up?

Has world
justice been frozen in an upside-down position?

The
shoe-thrower of Iraq, the man who hurled his shoes at
Bush, was condemned to three years in prison. Doesn’t he
deserve, instead, a medal?

Who is the
terrorist? The hurler of shoes or their recipient? Is
not the real terrorist the serial killer who, lying,
fabricated the Iraq war, massacred a multitude, and
legalized and ordered torture?

Who are the
guilty ones–the people of Atenco, in Mexico, the
indigenous Mapuches of Chile, the Kekchies of Guatemala,
the landless peasants of Brazil—all being accused of the
crime of terrorism for defending their right to their
own land? If the earth is sacred, even if the law does
not say so, aren’t its defenders sacred too?

According
to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most
dangerous place in the world. But who are the pirates?
The starving people who attack ships or the speculators
of Wall Street who spent years attacking the world and
who are now rewarded with many millions of dollars for
their pains?

Why does
the world reward its ransackers?

Why is
justice a one-eyed blind woman? Wal-Mart, the most
powerful corporation on earth, bans trade unions.
McDonald’s, too. Why do these corporations violate,
with criminal impunity, international law? Is it
because in this contemporary world of ours, work is
valued as lower than trash and workers’ rights are
valued even less?

Who are the
righteous and who are the villains? If international
justice really exists, why are the powerful never
judged? The masterminds of the worst butcheries are
never sent to prison. Is it because it is these
butchers themselves who hold the prison keys?

What makes
the five nations with veto power in the United Nations
inviolable? Is it of a divine origin, that veto power
of theirs? Can you trust those who profit from war to
guard the peace?

Is it fair
that world peace is in the hands of the very five
nations who are also the world’s main producers of
weapons? Without implying any disrespect to the drug
runners, couldn’t we refer to this arrangement as yet
another example of organized crime?

Those who
clamor, everywhere, for the death penalty are strangely
silent about the owners of the world. Even worse, these
clamorers forever complain about knife-wielding
murderers, yet say nothing about missile-wielding
arch-murderers.

And one
asks oneself: Given that these self-righteous world
owners are so enamored of killing, why pray don’t they
try to aim their murderous proclivities at social
injustice? Is it a just a world when, every minute,
three million dollars are wasted on the military, while
at the same time fifteen children perish from hunger or
curable disease? Against whom is the so-called
international community armed to the teeth? Against
poverty or against the poor?

Why don’t
the champions of capital punishment direct their ire at
the values of the consumer society, values which pose a
daily threat to public safety? Or doesn’t, perhaps, the
constant bombardment of advertising constitute an
invitation to crime? Doesn’t that bombardment numb
millions and millions of unemployed or poorly paid
youth, endlessly teaching them the lie that “to be = to
have,” that life derives its meaning from ownership of
such things as cars or brand name shoes? Own, own, they
keep saying, implying that he who has nothing is,
himself, nothing.

Why isn’t
the death penalty applied to death itself? The world is
organized in the service of death. Isn’t it true that
the military industrial complex manufactures death and
devours the greater part of our resources as well as a
good part of our energies? Yet the owners of the world
only condemn violence when it is exercised by others.
To extraterrestrials, if they existed, such monopoly of
violence would appear inexplicable. It likewise appears
insupportable to earth dwellers who, against all the
available evidence, hope for survival: we humans are the
only animals who specialize in mutual extermination, and
who have developed a technology of destruction that is
annihilating, coincidentally, our planet and all its
inhabitants.

This
technology sustains itself on fear. It is the fear of
enemies that justifies the squandering of resources by
the military and police. And speaking about
implementing the death penalty, why don’t we pass a
death sentence on fear itself? Would it not behoove us
to end this universal dictatorship of the professional
scaremongers? The sowers of panic condemn us to
loneliness, keeping solidarity outside our reach:
falsely teaching us that we live in a dog-eat-dog world,
that he who can must crush his fellows, that danger is
lurking behind every neighbor. Watch out, they keep
saying, be careful, this neighbor will steal from you,
that other one will rape you, that baby carriage hides a
Muslim bomb, and that woman who is watching you–that
innocent-looking neighbor of yours—will surely infect
you with swine flu.

In this
upside-down world, they are making us afraid of even the
most elementary acts of justice and common sense. When
President Evo Morales started to re-build Bolivia, so
that his country with its indigenous majority will no
longer feel shame facing a mirror, his actions provoked
panic. Morales’ challenge was indeed catastrophic from
the traditional standpoint of the racist order, whose
beneficiaries felt that theirs was the only possible
option for Bolivia. It was Evo, they felt, who ushered
in chaos and violence, and this alleged crime justified
efforts to blow up national unity and break Bolivia into
pieces. And when President Correa of Ecuador refused to
pay the illegitimate debts of his country, the news
caused terror in the financial world and Ecuador was
threatened with dire punishment, for daring to set such
a bad example. If the military dictatorships and
roguish politicians have always been pampered by
international banks, have we not already conditioned
ourselves to accept it as our inevitable fate that the
people must pay for the club that hits them and for the
greed the plunders them?

But, have
common sense and justice always been divorced from each
other?

Were not
common sense and justice meant to walk hand in hand,
intimately linked?

Aren’t
common sense, and also justice, in accord with the
feminist slogan which states that if we, men, had to go
through pregnancy, abortion would have been free. Why
not legalize the right to have an abortion? Is it
because abortion will then cease being the sole
privilege of the women who can afford it and of the
physicians who can charge for it?

The same
thing is observed with another scandalous case of denial
of justice and common sense: why aren’t drugs legal? Is
this not, like abortion, a public health issue? And the
very same country that counts in its population more
drug addicts than any other country in the world, what
moral authority does it have to condemn its drug
suppliers? And why don’t the mass media, in their
dedication to the war against the scourge of drugs, ever
divulge that it is Afghanistan which single-handedly
satisfies just about all the heroin consumed in the
world? Who rules Afghanistan? Is it not militarily
occupied by a messianic country which conferred upon
itself the mission of saving us all?

Why aren’t
drugs legalized once and for all? Is it because they
provide the best pretext for military invasions, in
addition to providing the juiciest profits to the large
banks who, in the darkness of night, serve as
money-laundering centers?

Nowadays
the world is sad because fewer vehicles are sold. One
of the consequences of the global crisis is a decline of
the otherwise prosperous car industry. Had we some
shred of common sense, a mere fragment of a sense of
justice, would we not celebrate this good news?

Could
anyone deny that a decline in the number of automobiles
is good for nature, seeing that she will end up with a
bit less poison in her veins? Could anyone deny the
value of this decline in car numbers to pedestrians,
seeing that fewer of them will die?

Here’s how
Lewis Carroll’s queen explained to Alice how justice is
dispensed in a looking-glass world:

“There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now,
being punished: and the trial doesn’t begin until
next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last
of all.”

In El
Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero found that
justice, like a snake, only bites barefoot people. He
died of gunshot wounds, for proclaiming that in his
country the dispossessed were condemned from the very
start, on the day of their birth.

Couldn’t
the outcome of the recent elections in El Salvador be
viewed, in some ways, as a homage to Archbishop Romero
and to the thousands who, like him, died fighting for
right-side-up justice in this reign of injustice?

At times
the narratives of History end badly, but she, History
itself, never ends. When she says goodbye, she only
says: I’ll be back.

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